By Jenny Neyman

Photo courtesy of Perry Miller. Thousands of razor clams line the tideline on the Ninilchik Beach on Nov. 17. The clams were dislodged by a windstorm and tossed ashore.
Redoubt Reporter
Some days, it’s just not good to be a clam. In Ninilchik, Nov. 17 was one of those days.
A winter storm lashed the sandy beaches at the mouth of the Ninilchik River with ferocious waves, powerful enough to uproot thousands of razor clams from their snug, sandy confines and toss them up onto the beach, beyond where they could dig back into the sand again.
“There was a winter storm event that loosened them up and stranded them high on the beach where they couldn’t re-bury themselves. The tide had gone out and subsequent tides were lower so the water didn’t get up to them again, so they died,” said Nicky Szarzi, area management biologist for lower Cook Inlet for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Sportfish Division. “The wind creates big waves that kind of emulsifies the sand to some depth or other, depending on how severe the storm is and what direction the wind’s coming from. That kind of stirs up the sand to liquid so the clams have nothing to hang onto, and the wave action just moves them around and they can’t get purchase again in the sand.”
Being tossed onshore doesn’t necessarily mean a razor clam will die, if the surf reclaims it soon enough. But in this case, the Ninilchik beach became a graveyard for thousands of clams that couldn’t bury themselves again.
“It was an automatic death sentence for the ones that got deposited up in the gravel. I don’t know how many were dug up that re-buried themselves, but there were sure a lot that were up in the intertidal area,” Szarzi said.
Her office in Homer got reports of the clam die-off on Nov. 17 and she went to Ninilchik to investigate on Friday. From what residents told her, many of the clams had already washed back out to sea, but there were still thousands left exposed on the beach.
“Winter die-offs happen pretty regularly. There have been events reported in the Lower 48, in Washington, with thousands of thousands of clams. I’ve never actually seen one, myself, in Alaska before, so I don’t know how significant this was relative to ones that have happened in the past, but folks in Ninilchik were reporting that they hadn’t seen anything quite that extensive before,” Szarzi said.
Greg Encelewski, lifelong Ninilchik resident and president of the Ninilchik Traditional Council, said this is the largest clam die-off he can remember seeing.
“It was a storm and a phenomenon that I haven’t ever seen in my lifetime,” he said. “I don’t know how many came out, but there were thousands and thousands of clams, just rolling in the tide as far as you could see in both directions.”
Perry Miller, a systems administrator for the council, also headed to the beach Nov. 17 and took photos to document the event.
“Instead of kelp in the tide, it was just clams,” Miller said. “In some of the protective breaks they were piled up 8 inches thick.”
It’s not uncommon for a die-off to happen en masse. Since clams live in concentrated groups, what happens to one tends to happen to them all, Szarzi said. In this case, there just happened to be a bumper crop of clams at the Ninilchik beach to be affected.
“We just had a huge new generation of clams come onto the beaches about two years ago. It looks like most of the clams that we saw were of that new cohort of clams,” Szarzi said.
A sure sign that a species has a rough existence is how prolific it is at reproduction. And razor clams don’t have much to do other than filter feed, grow, spawn and get harvested by any number of birds and mammals, including man. Every year in Cook Inlet, about a million or so razor clams are taken recreationally from the beaches between Kasilof and Anchor Point.
To compensate for being a popular menu item in the local food chain, and for living at the often-challenging whim of wind, waves and the ecosystem, razor clams are abundant spawners, with each female generating hundreds of thousands to many millions of eggs. Most of those eggs don’t result in new clams, but occasionally a large age class does result from a summer’s spawning season.

Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. Clams wash back and forth with the tide Monday at the Ninilchik beach.
“They’re continually reproducing every year, but about every fifth or so there’s a really big year class, so this is probably that year class,” Szarzi said.
Razor clams that are 2 years old are typically about 2 to 3 inches in length. They can eventually grow to be 7 inches and can live as long as 18 years,
Encelewski said the clams he saw were not the 4- to 5-inch size he’s used to seeing, but what they lacked in size they more than made up for in easy harvesting.
Ninilchik-area Native residents often harvest fish and game for subsistence reasons, he said. As word of the unearthed clams spread through the community, residents headed to the beach to make the most of the situation.
“We got down there right away with buckets and started filling them. We picked up what we could to share with the elders and others. They were small, but everyone enjoyed them,” Encelewski said.
Szarzi said it’s fine to harvest unearthed razor clams as long as gatherers have a valid sportfishing license and stick to the bag limit of 60 clams per day, 120 in possession. Fish and Game regulations just specify that clams must be taken by hand, with rakes, shovels and the like, rather than mechanical means.
Though harvesters are usually in for a wet, gritty experience when clamming on Cook Inlet beaches, the regulations don’t say that clams absolutely must be dug. In this case it was finders keepers, and hopefully nobody ended up as weepers from food poisoning.
The clams were most likely fine to eat, especially if they were harvested the day they were washed ashore when they were still alive, or just recently deceased. Freezing temperatures also likely prolonged their freshness.
“Probably a third weren’t broken at all, some were a little broken and a few were smashed. The ones that were alive were pretty frosty. If you held them in your hand, they’d warm up and slowly start moving,” Miller said.
Usually, when clams die their shell opens and they just sit limp when touched, rather than compressing their shell together.
“Some of those clams on Wednesday were still alive. After they’re dead you don’t know how long they’ve been out there so it’s up to the judgment of the person (whether to eat them),” Szarzi said. “The clam’s digestive system starts to break down so the flavor starts to decline. But you can take whole clams and freeze them and clean them later if you’ve just dug them on your own, and they’re fine. Or I’ve kept clams in the refrigerator, but they do start to break down after they die.”
She pointed out that razor clams in Cook Inlet are not routinely tested for paralytic shellfish poisoning.
“So we always tell people, regardless of whether there’s a big event or something like this, that they eat them at their own risk,” she said.
It isn’t clear how this die-off will affect Ninilchik razor clam populations in the future. It’s possible that clammers might not notice a decline at all.
“Fortunately it was a huge age class to begin with, so there’s probably some segment of it that’s still out there. It might just result in a smaller number of recruits in the future when they become mature and spawn,” Szarzi said.
Another mitigating factor is that clam offspring are swept up and down east-side Cook Inlet beaches with the tides and currents. Clams spawning to the north in Clam Gulch or to the south toward Anchor Point could replenish a diminished Ninilchik stock.
“The progeny of clams from one area don’t necessarily stay in that area. The currents disperse them to some extent up and down the beaches,” she said.
So, don’t get too maudlin about the fate of these mollusks. Sometimes being a clam just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“This kind of event happens,” Szarzi said. “Clams produce a lot of gametes, and that has evolved because of the severe environment that they find themselves in. So it’s expected that when you have a big set like that that a lot of them are going to die. That’s kind of their life history. So this doesn’t necessarily spell doom for that age class.”
Reporter Joseph Robertia contributed to this story.
